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Clip description
The clip shows this ALP cinema advertisement, for the 28 September 1946 federal election, in its entirety.
Curator’s notes
The ad focuses on the strength and deftness of Labor’s leadership of the country through the Second World War and the immediate postwar period – first under John Curtin then under the incumbent JB (Ben) Chifley.
The ad itself looks very much like a wartime propaganda newsreel – a format very familiar to its audience at the time. It emphasises the role Chifley had played in assisting Curtin to bring the country successfully through the war, while highlighting his experience on the international stage. It includes a shot of Chifley with US President Harry S Truman, probably taken during their meeting in Washington on Thursday 9 May 1946.
John Curtin had been Prime Minister of Australia from just before the bombing of Pearl Harbour and he had seen the country through the Second World War’s many adversities. But Curtin was plagued by illness and fatigue in the last year or so of the war. He favoured Ben Chifley, minister for postwar reconstruction, as his successor. By the time Curtin died on 5 July 1945, Chifley had already stepped into the leadership breach on a number of occasions. When caucus voted Chifley in as the new prime minister, he was initially seen as someone who could maintain his popular predecessor’s methods and momentum. Although close to Curtin, Chifley was temperamentally a very different person. He soon established his own man-of-the-people, no-frills approach to peacetime economic management and social reconstruction.
At the time of the 1946 election the postwar economy was beginning to boom, but with labour (there were still around 250,000 Australian defence personnel yet to be demobilised and repatriated) and materials shortages affecting supply, burgeoning inflation threatened economic stability. Unsure of the popularity in the electorate of Chifley’s style, the party’s campaign managers used a ‘helmsman steering the ship-of-state’ metaphor to promote the leader – hence the title of the ad.
